


Pollinctores

by Selden



Category: Le Serment des Horaces | Oath of the Horatii - Jacques-Louis David
Genre: Grand-guignol, Graphic descriptions of corpses and of illness, M/M, Mention of non-con and of an arguably sexualised minor, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, dub-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 09:03:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/pseuds/Selden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[...] pollinctores appellatos dicunt, qui mortuis os polline oblinebant, ne livor appareret extincti.</p><p>[...] 'They say that [they] are called pollinctores, who preserved the face of the dead person with dust, to prevent the greenish color of the deceased from showing.</p><p>Maurus Servius Honoratus, In tria Virgilii Opera Expositio; commentary on Aeneid 9.4.87</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pollinctores

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ineffabilitea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ineffabilitea/gifts).



 

 

[The Sleep of Endymion](http://www.artandeducation.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/the-sleep-of-endymion-1791-by-anne-louis-girodet-de-roussytrioson-17931.jpeg)

 

September 1789, Rome

 

I stand under shivery golden light in the church of the Virgin, Santa Maria, looking at his memorial. Jean-Germain Drouais. He came to Monsieur David before I did, and when Jean-Germain won the Prix de Rome - a trip to the eternal city, all expenses paid - Monsieur David upped sticks and came with him, wife and all. The master and his finest student, walking on Roman pavements. Past the chattering ghosts along the Appian Way.

I must send home for funds to employ an Italian tutor. And I need a wig stand. You prune your belongings and travel like an artist, leaving perfectly good shoes bundled up in the corner of the studio to warp and rot. And then you get here and the boys are turning their noses up at the cut of your coat.

Jean-Germain died here a year ago of smallpox. Nasty way to go.

Monsieur David painted _The Oath of the Horatii_ here in Rome. The light that comes from behind you into the painting as you look at it, from above your left shoulder, is Roman light, coming down through the centuries. It reaches just so far and no further into that dim tight courtyard, and shadows spill away from the feet of the men like wax in water.

When I made my copy, Monsieur David told me to make it deeper, deeper. I gave more detail to the background, to the dark under the arches where the spear points the way to the door.

The air in this church is bitter with old incense. Glitter is everywhere overhead.

 I wonder where they found the models, Monsieur David and poor dead Jean-Germain. Walking through the heat that clogs your throat, dust and carts and pillars and squawking chickens, ancient brickwork with its marble cladding long since lost. Via Lata, wide street. Not like most of Paris, where the houses nod together, pinching in our little streets that smell of cheese or candle tallow or hot bread. And, after dark, rumbling with black-draped carts taking the bones from the overstuffed graves of Les Innocents to the newly consecrated catacombs, torches flaring and priests walking behind. When they tore the old church down two years before I left for Rome, my mother cried. She hadn't even lived in Paris for a year. Things change too fast these days, she said.

Monsieur David has his apartments at the Louvre, talking of wide spaces. Of course he does; Madame David’s father is Contractor of Royal Buildings. Brickdust under his nails for all his gold buttons. And probably by now out of a job, O tempora O mores.

I was some months his student when Monsieur David and Jean-Germain came to Rome. 1784, the centenary of Corneille’s death. Our great playwright, no comparison, Monsieur David says. Worth a dozen of Racine. And who, a hundred years from now, will be our great artist? Not Jean-Germain, to be certain. He died too young. His portrait is carved in a roundel, just above my head. It is very like, I must admit. He was good-looking enough. Below, the three Arts join to write his name, togas falling in fine long ruffles, smooth arms upraised.

I was seventeen, then. And my poor mother, after father’s death, unpacking bundles in her new room in Paris, noisy students above us and a sausage-maker and his wife below. I always thought I could smell raw meat, coming up through the floorboards, though my mother said it was mostly garlic. Sausages hung in great nubbled racks from their ceiling, her floor. Sometimes white mould bloomed in the cracks between the floorboards.

I knew Paris already. I had had my schooling there, living under Monsieur Trioson’s roof. He locked away my designs for a palace, once, to make me think more on my schooling and less on my art. It was architecture, then, high ceilings and long arcades, neat lines. Monsieur David, as well, began his training as an architect.  Monsieur Trioson was always sending news back to my parents, of my progress in Greek, in Latin, in rhetoric, of his latest efforts in turning my mind to things of more worth than drawing. I know it would have pleased him if I had followed him into medicine.

But when I was seventeen and we were sitting in my mother’s room, too much furniture for so small a space, half of it still wrapped in straw and sacking, a bundle of sausages from Monsieur and Madame Bernard on the table by the window, he said that he would no longer stand in my way, and my mother wrapped one hand around the other and nodded. Her knuckles were red and shiny with chilblains. It is not that she married beneath her, but she could naturally have married quite as well as her brother, if things had gone a little differently when she was young. Certainly my father was a good man. But it was hard to see Monsieur Trioson in her cold and smelly room. Sometimes I feel a kind of relief that she died before I left for Rome. It is a hard life for a widow in Paris.

I was already accepted by Monsieur David. He called for all his students to have an education, but they say Jean-Germain had to teach himself Latin. His father was a painter of court ladies, the Pompadour in her ribbons and bows. He left Jean-Germain an income of 20 000 livres a year.

I will tell M Trioson that I need the money for a language tutor only. He cannot possibly object to that.

It is hardly as if I would write for help to Monsieur David. I found out long ago that he will talk sweet to your face and then laugh at your work behind your back.

They say as well that Jean-Germain worked all night and all day. That when his friends dressed him up to drag him out on the town, he cut off his curls to give himself an excuse to go on painting. And the worst of it is, this is nothing less than the truth. He gave himself to art more completely than any man I have ever known. More completely than our master, that is certain.

Once I saw Monsieur David looking at one of his canvases. He was following the line of a figure with his hand, as he was touching the flesh of a model, or a lover. Not like he touches his students, though touch them he does. Of course.

Sometimes I think it is like the Latin, something he does because it is Classical. Capital fucking C. Really, you have to feel sorry for him. To have a sweet young arse cracked open before you and see only duty and honour and the glories of Rome winking up at you – well, talk about laying down your prick on the altar of the Muses.

He only fucked me a couple of times, and he had the gall to be brisk about it, fingering me open like priming a canvas, there boy, breath into it. Like being fucked by a doctor. Open wide, here's your prick enema, my good sir! And god for-fucking-bid he lay a hand on my dick. Sometimes one sees why Ovid had harsh words to say about the Greek way of doing things. And by things, naturally, I mean boys.

We all fucked each other, of course. Me and François, me and Antoine-Jean. Linseed oil and walnut oil and jokes about my name. I used to tell everyone how it was from the Hebrew, Annas, in school, but when I discovered other boys' dicks I stopped minding; even played it up. Sweet Anne wants something, can you guess? We fucked each other and squared off paper and drank cheap wine with grit at the bottom, and I was more happy than I had ever been before in all my life.

But Monsieur David, I think he thought he was doing us a favour. Every symposium needs its pretty face. Look at the absolute Molly-boy he put into _The Death of Socrates_ , handing out the hemlock with his hair primped to high heaven and his scarlet toga clinging to his sweet little arse, calves bulging like rising bread.

He put me to painting Plato, glooming at the end of the bed, almost as far from the action as the women out in the entrance hall. He took Socrates. And he let himself scumble and dab at the canvas while he made us students paint smooth and tight as – well, as hemlock-boy’s arse. So of course it’s his end of the canvas that looks like Socrates might have signed off on it himself, like it’s seen the weight of centuries. And it’s the students’ half that looks fussy and new, like a woman made up for the stage.

I’m going to make my next painting so smooth and soft the finish on my parts of the _Socrates_ will look like pumice. Untouched by human hand. Well, he asked for it.

Then, when I finished my copy of the _Horatii_ (deeper, smoother), he tried to give me a fucking bonus. Six gold Louis. For all your hard work. I told him where to shove it. He didn’t fuck me again after that.

That was three years ago.

Five years ago, when I was seventeen, Monsieur David packed up his studio and went with Jean-Germain to Rome. We other students were left to work under Monsieur Brenet. He was working on Endymion sleeping under a blue sky, the Moon who loves him so much she gave him eternal sleep not due for hours yet. We used to laugh at him behind his back, because he was not Monsieur David, I think. And of course there’s something inescapably amusing about the second rate artist. If they know they’re second rate, anyway. And Monsieur Brenet – well, I think he did. Endymion, now, ravished by a woman. He doesn’t know, so it isn’t silly. Not as silly as it could be, anyway. She is, of course. ‘There's no need to tell you what happens next. You must remember I'm dying of love.' That’s her, in Lucian. Nudge nudge. But he gets to be young and beautiful forever, and he doesn’t know a thing when some goddess comes and fucks down on him every single night. He doesn’t get knocked up and pop out some demigod hero, she doesn’t carry him off across the sea or into the heavens. Everything stays just as it was, frozen, poised, ready for the moon to come again. Monsieur Dildo just lies there and gives it.

Of course, I’m not putting any goddess into my Endymion. The way I’m going to paint him, he’ll be goddess enough for the both of them.

Bernini’s St Teresa five minutes away in Santa Maria della Vittoria, opening her legs for God. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what Rome is good for. That and the men in the Caffe Grèco. Sketching expeditions with Jean-Pierre, hazy blue hills and grass in your hair. They uncovered the _Sleeping Hermaphrodite_ when they were digging foundations for the church, incidentally. Talking of the glories of Rome. And had Bernini carve it a new mattress, the stone swelling as if freshly stuffed.

For his piece for the academy, Jean-Germain painted a wounded athlete, beard and round shield and red cloak. It has to be a male nude, after all, for the academy. Nothing less will do. A wound on his thigh. A little line, seeping. Stiff and stern and striving. Monsieur Brenet’s Endymion cants backwards, tits to the blue sky. Jean-Germain painted his athlete clenched around his pain, muscles swollen in new and terrible ways.

Like the échorchés put together by anatomists, muscle and sinew preserved and pumped up with coloured wax, stiffened with wires, embalmed with aromatic spirits.

For Monsieur David, too, it was Boucher who was his true master, not Monsieur Vien under whom he suffered for so many years. Boucher told him he would give his painting warmth. You can see it in his early painting, _Mars and Minerva_ , the old style. Flickering and filmy, soft. Womanish. Minerva is winning. We see the inside of her shield, padded like a high backed chair. Boucher painted pale ladies in dark gardens, pink and green. Behind their little smiles the leaves grow deeper, darker.

 

I painted a scene from Corneille’s _Horace_ that year, the death of Camilla. She weeps for her betrothed Curiace, slain by her brother for the honour of Rome, and her brother kills her for her tears. It does not happen on stage, but in a painting you can show the real thing. I made a little slit at her breastbone, in bright red, and had her hair come undone. Juvenilia to be sure, like the _Mars and Minerva_ : I had everyone wearing yellow, as if someone had pissed in their washing. But I liked painting Horace, arm and sword upraised, the crest of his helmet crisp as freshly starched cotton.

They say that Jean-Germain painted the yellow cloak in the _Horatii_ , when he and Monsieur David were both in Rome. When Monsieur David retouched my copy, he didn’t add a spot of paint to the cloak that I could see.

When I first saw the _Oath of the Horatii_ , back from Rome in straw and sacking, my first thought was that the scene does not come in Corneille’s play, backstage or not. ‘La gloire de ce choix m’enfle d’un juste orgueil’, Corneille’s brotherless Horace says to Curiace, filled with a just pride, orgueil, a heavy word.

There is no need for this Horace to swear, to firm up his courage in the Roman sunlight, arm upraised. It is Curiace, the man of Alba, the enemy, who must delay, pissing and moaning about being chosen to fight the brother of his betrothed. And then they end up spitted on Horace’s sword, first Curiace and then Camilla.

In the painting the women droop and cover their eyes before the deep dark arches. Make them deeper, said Monsieur David to me later. Deeper and darker. It was a matter of some difficulty, because the copy was smaller, barely half the size. Heaven confounds our pride when it rises too high, says the old Horace his father, Camilla freshly dead. Orgueil. But ‘elle était criminelle’, it rhymes so much it must be true. The play is all couplets, little mirrors looking back and forth. Copies that make things more true, line by line. Emulation, imitation, _Nachahmung_.

 

If he’d asked me, I could have found him a scene that, oh, actually occurs at some point in the narrative. In schoolroom Plutarch, if not Corneille himself. I would even have found a copy of Dionysus of Halicarnassus.

 

Every morning in the studio, I used to prepare my palette in front of the _Oath of the Horatii_. Gamboge, Naples yellow. Smalt. Sap green. Venetian red.

 

When Boucher painted interiors, he filled them with gold and mirrors, shining, something to have at your back in the dark. Rooms that smell of dried roses and the patchouli leaves that wrap silks when they come from the east. Well, I have been in such rooms and they smell mostly of piss and old women. Little moth cases nest in the folds of silk, delicate and filmy. When Monsieur Trioson took me with him on a visit to treat _Mesdames_ , the king’s aunts, when I was a boy, a little dog ran out between my feet from under the draperies of the curtains. It was as if the room had come alive, clouds of dust and powder, gold and stale piss and old ladies making shapes with their mouths.

Like the Academy here in Rome. Grand outside and inside full of shit. A madhouse presided over by that royalist toady. But then, aren’t we all. Dip your dick into the creamiest young arse and see what it looks like when you pull out.

The church bustles around me, chatter wisping up into the dusty gold corners. Jean-Germain looks leftward forever above his three solemn ladies. Even in this fuzzy light, it is as if the pale stone is glowing from within. Fine marble is the same all the way through. Translucent, even, if you cut it thin enough. I kiss my fingers quickly and touch them to his little marble face. What it is to die young, to lie safe and still.

 

They say that Monsieur David said one thing when he heard that Jean-Germain was dead.

 

They say he said this: I have lost my emulation.

 

 

* * *

 

 

[The Death of Bara](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mort_de_Barra_IMG_2266.JPG)

 

Messidor 1794, Paris.

 

When I come back home, it is Madame David I meet first. She is hurrying through the streets with two dish-faced girls in tow, faces pale in the heat. Dark moons of sweat show in her armpits.

And now she is Citizen Pécoul.

“We divorced in the spring,” she says, glancing round.

I do not ask why. It would not be healthy for either of us to be talking about the death of the king, that even I can tell.

“You should see him, though,” she insists. “If you can get an audience, of course, now that our good sir moves in such high circles.”

“I remember how he has always cared for his boys,” she says. “You know young Monsieur Drouais?”

“Jean-Germain?”

“That’s the one. Of course, you knew him before he came to Rome with us. Well, after he died, Jacques-Louis kept all his letters. He had a shrine built for them in our garden, out in the trees.”

She looks at my face and smiles a little, sideways.

“Oh, don’t look like that, young man. It’s not the business of a wife to sigh over such things. Frankly, I was pleased to see him acting like a living man, for once. It’s not good for the health to play the Roman hero for too long.”

 

It is not hard to find Citizen David in the least.

He is in the deconsecrated Church of the Cordeliers, which lies all but empty in the stagnant summer air.

A bored functionary – or perhaps not; these days it is hard to tell who anyone is meant to be – unlocks the door for me, and I slip inside. The church is almost cool, though very still. I feel as though I have stepped through the arches beyond the straining Horatii, into a darker and a greater room.

I walk across the tiled floor to where Monsieur David stands, intent on something lying on a dais. The church is high and wide around us, tall vaults stretching above us into hot shadow, but already the air smells sweet and sharp, vinegar and shit and rotten jasmine.

It is very hot, after all.

In the Champs Elysées, hawkers are selling toy guillotines, snip snap. Put your finger in the head-hole.

In little towns across the country, you look at the dust in the town square as you stumble out of the coach, legs cramping. Is it caked with something brown-black, sticky-sweet? Are the houses whispering around you, or some windows cracked?

The people are always silent, but then, it is so very hot.

Paris is different. The streets roar. And then, again, they are quiet. I no longer understand the city’s rhythms, and, in these days, this is no small thing.

They say the pageants designed by Monsieur David have not been equalled since the days of Rome.

The streets were still trampled down from the Festival of the Republic One and Indivisible when I arrived. Bruised branches of olive in the streets, old banners. Feathers, where they let loose the thousands of doves. The crowds swore to defend the constitution with the raised arms of the Horatii, thousands of them lifting invisible swords to the white July sky.

The sky of Messidor, that is.

We all remember how terrible things were before. How great the easy cruelty of the wealthy and well bred.

Snip-snap.

My heels tap across the tiles. Before me, Monsieur David bends over the shape on the table.

It reminds me of the public dissections at the Jardin du Roi, banks of people, even women, peering down at a corpse being flensed of flesh, bones cracked, meat squeezed and folded back, fluids drained.

He raises a hand at my arrival. His wig is off, his face tight and streaked with sweat, his eyes bright.

“Ah, Anne-Louis,” he says, as if he last saw me weeks ago, not years. “Welcome, citizen!”

“Citizen David,” I say. I bow my head, despite myself. Citizen David, these days, is an important man. A very important man.

I peer down at the corpse on the table. The smell hits the back of my throat like rotten milk. I step back hastily.

 

“He looks like I felt back in Venice,” I say.

Impolitic. But Jacques-Louis knows more than anyone – except a handful of Italian quacks – about my illness, the swelling and the fevers and pissing something pale and thick as egg whites. The smell.

Bile rises sharp in my throat, tasting of the lemonade that is all I could stomach in this heat. They are selling it everywhere, like the cockades and little guillotines. I swallow it back.

“Hmm,” he says. Distracted. He’s dragging thick white greasepaint over the soggy, greenish cheeks of what was Monsieur Marat, hero of the people, and he can’t even be bothered to tell me to fuck off.

I asked him not to spread it around, my illness, that is. I had a dream, a few times, where he told Monsieur Trioson and Monsieur Trioson stood in my damp little room in Venice and looked at me like he used to look at men riddled with diseases of a certain nature. They say mine was different, but god knows that if so it is not because I kept my dick to myself.

I would dream that Monsieur Trioson had my piss and pus and blood laid out before him on a palette, that he held it out and looked grave. That he picked up a brush.

It was Monsieur David, in the end, to whom I begged for the money to come home. I told him everything, even about my poor hair and that pale stuff I pissed.

 

Now he is painting Monsieur Marat’s squeaky, swollen flesh. So that he can provide an inspiration to the people, lying in state. They say that even Monsieur Robespierre is dubious, wary of what fury this new martyr will raise up.

But Jacques-Louis has designed the ceremony. Draperies lie ready for the dais; lanterns, waiting to be hoisted high, leave rings of oil on the floor around us.

I make a grab at the brush, tugging it out of his hand with a squeak of claggy paint. That gets his attention. He blinks at me. The corpse stinks.

Then he straightens himself up, claps me on the back with a sticky hand.

“Anne-Louis!” he says, suddenly jovial. “My boy! I read about your exploits!”

 

For a moment I think he means my letters, from when I was ill. Something curls low and sick in my stomach. I finger my neck, where even in this heat I wear a scarf to hide the scar and the remaining swelling.

“I owe you a very great debt,” I say hastily. “You may be sure I was not exaggerating my symptoms – ”

But Monsieur – citizen - is slapping my shoulder, steering me away from the bier. We pick our way through jugs of vinegar and loose tangles of white cloth. For this sort of thing, surely you need women? To weep and tear at their hair and clean up the smelly, seeping dead. Madame Bernard did it for my mother, with her sausage-smelling fingers.

“No, no,” he is saying. “About your heroism in Rome! When the mob sacked the Mancini Palace and you yourself just barely escaped as they tore to shreds your great statue of Republican Liberty – ”

“It was hardly my statue,” I say weakly.

I can scarcely complain. This _is_ more or less how I put things to that nice young man, Michel something-or-other. And I knew perfectly well he was a pamphlet-writer.

“Oh, I could guess that,” he says blithely. “I never did teach you more than the rudiments of sculpture. But the glory of it, Anne-Louis, the glory. Drinking libations to Brutus in the streets of Rome herself! Crowning his noble head with oak after so many centuries, so many generations of tyranny and greed!”

He turns towards me, seizing my upper arms. I’d never realised how much shorter he is.

“You did do so?” he asks. “You did drink to Brutus? You had his bust?”

“And an engraving of you yourself,” I say. “Of my portrait of you, that is. And yes, yes of course we raised our glasses to Brutus and to Rome. We could do no less.”

“Good,” he murmurs, turning and walking back and forth across the worn tiles of the floor. “Good, good.”

I notice he is fitting his feet into the tiles, following the pattern. It makes his pace a little jerky, as if he is running on clockwork.

“And my work?” I ask. “You saw my piece for the academy - the _Endymion_ – but my _Hippocrates_? I can still hardly believe they reached here safely.”

I can hardly believe the _Endymion_ got finished at all. I’m not about to tell him how, in my mania for perfect smoothness, I used olive oil to mix the paints. Three months before it was meant to be finished, and the paint was still soppy as a whore’s cunt. I had to scrape almost all of it away, then work like Jean-Germain, hardly stopping to eat or sleep, to get it done. And then – I know it was a sensation here in Paris. Even Monsieur Trioson has said kind words. I use his name now. Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson.

Jacques-Louis is smiling.

“A remarkable work,” he says.

“I wanted to do something entirely new,” I say. I think of the moon’s white light glancing down onto Endymion’s breast, his soft flushed flesh dissolving into light, light reflecting back at the watching moon.

“And indeed,” says Jacques-Louis, “you did.”

Moon-glow splashing like foam off his side, the boy and the cupid held in an ocean of air, deep and dark and wet.

Not that dry courtyard or those stiff swords, I want to say. From the look on his face, I think maybe Jacques-Louis knows it.

“Something – not pedestrian.”

How his neck leans back, like a new organ. Not unearthed by anatomists in the body’s wet red mines, but still unseen until I laid it down.

Jacques-Louis is still smiling.

“That is,” he says, “an ambition.”

I think of his new painting, his _Marat’s Last Breath_ , just begun, sere pyramids and planes of space marked out. The body in its bath, the water hidden, the breath in his mouth, the wound another little line.

The deceiving letter in his hand.

And that other martyr, the boy Bara, who they say refused to shout ‘Long live the King!” Painted naked, as befits a symbol, his sweet body tumbled in paint so rough and raw the pikes of his retreating murderers half vanish in the muck.

The pageants winding through the city streets, here today and gone tomorrow.

Citizen David has done a great many things, signed a great many papers, since I last saw France.

That was before I knew what things the body really could contain, for all my talk of shit. How the neck could swell up gamboge and ochre and bleed Venetian red, and the face too, little by little, swelling and yellowing like cheap wet paper. Monsieur David’s face is swollen, too, down by his mouth. From some angles it looks as though he is pouting. I had been told to expect it, that the doctors cannot do a thing for him, but it still surprises. Faces do not change like that, I find myself thinking, although god knows mine did.

It healed, though. Perhap _s_ Monsieur David’s will do the same.

He is fretting over the funeral of Marat. It is too hot and the body too ripe for a procession. Lying in state will have to do. And perhaps girls with branches of bay, singing. Singing what?

He frowns and paces, face working.

I remind myself that he knew Monsieur Marat, that the dead man – the murdered man, murdered by a woman - was perhaps a friend.

“Ask that student you dug up years ago for a Roman precedent,” I suggest. “The one who got so over-excited when you asked him for advice about the _Death of Socrates_.”

His face darkens.

“That mewling scholastic? He was worse than useless with the _Socrates_ , you should know that. Picking and mincing over different stories, might bes and may haves – do you know, he had the blind audacity to present himself at my door, some months back? Got himself into some trouble with the Tribunal, of all things.”

“And?” I ask.

“And what? I sent him packing, and good riddance!” he says. “I suppose you might be able to dig him up in all truth by now, eh?”

I laugh politely.

 

He tugs at his sash, his hands shaking.

“Anne-Louis,” he says, “Rome has made you a man, has it not.”

He plucks at my necktie, has my jacket off me and my necktie undone, is fumbling with my breeches, before I realise that he wants to fuck.

“Here, Monsieur David?” I hiss, scandalised.

Even without the corpse, some months ago this place was a church. Is a church still, for all I can tell.

“Here,” he says. “Now.”

He is a frantic little man with a misshapen face, I think, his dark hair sticking up with sweat. And at the moment, he is perhaps a little mad. His eyes glitter in the dim church. And he is a leader of our country, more or maybe less, and without doubt a genius. History curves behind him with the force of a thousand straight-edged blades.

And I haven’t had a man touch me since I got ill.

I loosen my breeches.

 

As we tug each other to hardness in the transept, steadying ourselves against a pillar, I am overcome by a kind of schoolboy hilarity.

What is impossible, after this, I think. What is there left to do?

I also think of safety, and of power.

Of all the papers Citizen David has signed, and is perhaps yet to sign.

I take a handful of lamp oil; move to open myself. But he grabs my arm, almost tutting. I freeze like a naughty schoolboy, caught out of class.

“No, no,” he says, annoyed. “Not that way. Fuck – fuck my cunt.”

The words fall into the still air of the church like little pebbles.

I do not know this man, I realise. What I knew of him has ripened and grown strange in the summer heat.

But still. His cock is hard and red, shiny as broken glass. I scoop up more oil and reach to finger him.

As I stretch him open wide, wide like a girl, I whisper in his ear. Wet like one too. Your sloppy cunt. You dirty, dirty girl. He is hardly the first to ask for words like this, but from his clenched-closed eyes and straining cock he seems perhaps to think so.

He makes short noises as I fuck into him. And as I tug on his cock, bracing my other hand above his shoulder on the pillar, he comes before I do, eyes breaking open and staring sightless at the stone.

 

Beyond us, the dead man’s face stares up and glows, phosphorescent with greasepaint in the muzzled summer sun.

 

 

* * *

 

 

[The Intervention of the Sabine Women](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Intervention_of_the_Sabine_Women.jpg)

 

Brumaire 1794, Paris.

 

When I succeed in visiting Jacques-Louis in his prison room at the Luxembourg, I cannot tell if he is pleased to see me.

The light in his prison room is thin and grey. He has been painting the view from the window, fields, a road. Tiny people, you cannot see their faces.

A self portrait stands by the bed, paint loose, hair loose, palette in hand. A bit of red on it. Loose cravat, white. White light, hitting his face.

The room smells of oils and damp.

He tugs my hand towards his belt.

“We don’t have long,” he says. “Come on.”

 

I step backwards, just a little.

“Tell me,” I say. “Is it true that you told Monsieur Robespierre that you would drink the hemlock with him?”

He lets my hand fall. His face bunches up. With the swelling in his cheek, it is as if he is always eating something, always chewing.

In the portrait shadow falls over it, kindly. He made himself younger as well. Younger, smoother. The light falls softly on him. A little red in his cheeks.

I think he is about to spit out the words he is chewing, to scream and splutter. But instead he seems to swallow them. When he speaks, he sounds calm, even dull.

“I’m going to paint _The Intervention of the Sabine Women_ ,” he says.

I make a smile at him.

“Not the _Rape_? But of course, you already stole the lictor from Poussin’s _Rape of the Sabines_ for your _Horatii_. I can see that you wouldn’t want to repeat the whole composition.”

He looks puzzled.

“Emulation is the foundation of our art, Anne-Louis,” he says, almost gently. His eyes light up. “And only think, the noble women, baring their breasts, bringing out their newborn babes, to stop their husbands slaughtering their brothers. In the centre, one with arms outspread, like so,” he says, holding out his arms, looking past my shoulder at the wall.

He knocks the canvas with his portrait on it, smears the paint a little. It comes off on his fingers.

I step forward.

“You’ve got yourself dirty,” I say. “Filthy.”

He lets his arms fall. Behind him, his portrait looks brave and suffering.

“You had me fuck you just like a girl,” I say. “Already auditioning, were we?”

His mouth works. Like he is chewing.

“I have no time for your vulgarities, Anne-Louis,” he says. “Posterity will be my judge.”

“Posterity will be busy counting up how many heads you had snipped off.”

He looks at me with what I think is pity.

“Did you not drink to Brutus too, my boy? We have made a new path, a shining path. Not just a new – a new style.”

I breathe out through my teeth.

“The enemies of the people, my enemies, may be in the ascendant at present,” he says. “But we have shown them what the world can be. A pure world, a world of great men. Of great ideas.”

He holds out his arms again; lifts up his eyes.

 

“You wanted something a minute ago, didn’t you,” I say. My hands go to the waist of his breeches. “Well, allow me to oblige.”

His paint-smeared hands bat at my face as I kneel, as I undo his breeches. The cloth is shiny with dirt and paint. He has been imprisoned for some months already.

“There’s no need for such dramatics, Anne-Louis,” he says. “Please – ”

I tongue his dick, salty and ripe; gag my mouth with it. Above me, he makes a little sound, surprised, sweet. Too innocent for words.

His hands come up and rest in my wig; without thinking, I reach one hand up and yank it off. My hair is still patchy and sparse, greying already.

But then, so is his, whatever his portrait may say.

 

And really, not performing for an audience of one suppurating corpse has already raised the tone of our fucking no end. No need to stand on too much ceremony.

He clasps at my skull as I fuck his dick into my mouth, catching the back of my throat. It is a familiar, comfortable pain. Spit and snot slop down my face, soaking his balls, spotting my knees with wet. In the grey cold air, it feels as if his dick and my throat are the only hot things in the world, hot as Thermidor, as the summer past and lost. His hands, rough and tacky with paint, catch on my cropped hair.

And finally, he grabs me and fucks into my face, coming with a sort of sob. I wipe off the come from around my mouth and look down at it, pale as sweet moonlight on the winter-white skin of my hand.

 

 

When I meet Madame Pécoul going out, I am almost certain I blush. I nod and make to go past her, making for the gatekeeper we must both have bribed.

But it seems she wants to talk.

About the fall of Robespierre, his bandaged, bulging jaw leering at madame guillotine after he tried and failed to end himself, about the cruel things people have said about Citizen David’s failure to be present at the Convention when Robespierre was sentenced.

“You know,” she says, “back in ’89 I went with, oh, almost all the other artists’ wives in Paris, all our set, to the National Asssembly, with our jewels. To give them up for the good of the nation, you know? It happened once in Roman times. We were all wearing white, and the cockade as well. It’s not that I was such a stick-in-the-mud. Things had to change, anyone could see that.”

I nod agreeably. Awkward enough that I have her once-husband’s spunk in my stomach, but I am afraid that if I speak, my voice will be terribly hoarse.

“But then, when he agreed to the death of the king – ”

She breaks off, shaking her head.

“One change I’m not fussing myself about, for certain. Divorce is a much easier thing, these days.”

She smiles, small and wry.

I remind myself that she is an heiress. Useful, a father with dirt under his nails and gold buttons.

“Forgetting them, now that’s harder, isn’t it.”

I nod again.

“Indeed, Citizen.”

 

She sighs and hefts her basket. Sets it down again. Why, I wonder, am I the recipient of this confession? At this rate, she will smell it on me.

“You have seen his painting of the dead boy? Bara, I mean?” she is asking. Her voice rises, quickens. “He’s bare as the day he was born, and lying so that you can’t even see his little prick. He looks half a girl. Jacques-Louis says he took the legs from the he-she statue we saw in Rome, the Hermaphroditus with the nice arse."

She gives me a half-hearted wink.

"I can’t believe you didn’t go and see it,” she says. Her face tightens.

“The girls will be that age in a few years. And I couldn’t stop thinking, when I saw that picture – would he paint them that way? I mean, obviously not _that_ way. They are young ladies. But God knows neither of them would shout ‘Long live the King’, with all that they’ve been picking up. And if something happened, if they couldn’t keep their mouths shut, would he paint them as smiling little heroines, dead as muck?”

She stops, panting.

“And in the speech he wrote about the child, he said all sorts of things. That the new Republic had improved the weather and made childbirth painless. He called that boy Bara a hero and the men of the old regime effeminate - effeminate sybarites.”

She looks at me quickly; shakes her head.

“His words,” she says. “I’m glad that I divorced the crazy bastard.”

 

She picks up her basket. I expect she knows I know how hard she has lobbied for Monsieur David's release; it is common knowledge in our circles.

“You know,” I say carefully, “they say that Bara didn’t actually refuse to shout ‘long live the king’.”

“No?”

“No, he shouted ‘up yours, you fucking crook’ at the royalist soldiers. If you’ll excuse my language.”

Her big red face crumples up, and it’s a second before I realise that she’s laughing.

 

 

* * *

 

 

[Pygmalion and Galatea](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Girodet_Pygmalion.jpg)

 

September 1818, Paris

 

I hold my brush up to the canvas, careful not to get too close. It’s the look of the thing that’s important now. Lamps gutter around me, dusty hangings loom out of the dark with the rise and fall of the flames.

  
Behind me, I hear footsteps on the stairs, rustling and giggling. The worried, hushed tones of the maid. She’s been terrified of me ever since I beat her with my maulstick when one of my lamps was knocked over. I thought my painting was burnt. My Pygmalion, watching his ivory Galatea come to life.

  
Poor girl.

  
I’ve painted the Galatea as marble, though. Translucent, sheened and struck through with torchlight. So much more fleshly than ivory.

  
Like Marat, she breathes. A first breath, not a last.

  
Yes, I think this painting, too, will be a thing that endures. I think it over and over again, couplets reflecting in my mind's tired eye.

  
Behind me, the door opens. Middle-aged ladies in silks gasp and peer as I nod and smile. Then, as the maid tries to keep them back, inspiration strikes! I lunge at the canvas, holding my breath as I curve the brush around a curl of flesh, a sweep of cloth. Eyes only for art, now, as the maid shepherds the ladies back downstairs, whispering to each other about being right there as the spirit came upon me.

  
I step back and breath, put down my empty brush. Check that I have not smudged the paint.

  
My poor poor painting, your own Pygmalion is on the game.

  
But there is nothing wrong with a little drama, is there now.

  
When Jacques-Louis showed _The Intervention of the Sabines_ , there was a great mirror on the other wall of the room. Between the work and the mirror, with visitors in between bending over their explanatory leaflets (Jacques’ own work, but of course), it was like wandering into a battlefield where half the participants were still trying to learn their lines.

  
My little show at least has rather more verve.

  
Still, I doubt I will get my brush wet tonight. I am an old man now, or I feel old. My father Trioson is dead these three years, a grave, respectable doctor to the end. And I, in his place, am almost, horror of horrors, an institution. A sight of Paris. Old ladies visit me and whisper and (oh, shush) I fear this room may smell a little, under paints, of piss.

 

  
Things were so clear back then for Jacques-Louis. So clear for him that the rest of us could let things get a little darker, deeper, knowing that he would still be standing in that dry clean light, sword up and women weeping on the side.

  
Now he is in Brussels with his wife (his wife again) painting fat merchants, and I have lost my emulation.

  
What do his Romans have to say to me, now that he is not here to make them speak? Nisus and Euryalus, with their glinting armour and their heads raised up on pikes? Really, we’ve had enough of that sort of thing.

  
“Oh, ma chère Anne,” I hear my friend Julie saying to me, “you mustn’t let those old stories fuck you over.”

 

  
Julie’s great success was in ’93, rather like Jacques-Louis. She wrote and starred and sang and danced in an opera it never even occurred to me to miss, _The Pretty Farmer_.

  
“It would have been wasted on the likes of you, anyway, sweetheart,” she tells me.

  
It was Julie’s idea to stage these midnight bouts of inspiration.

  
“Well,” she says, “you’ve been working on this thing for about five years now, darling. You’ve got to do something to keep yourself in the public eye, or no-one will give a shit when the thing is finally finished. And since you insist on working at night, the scene sets itself! We certainly couldn’t let the worthies of Paris see your house in daylight, that’s for damn sure.”

  
So I pose for the ladies and try not to terrify my servants into leaving.

  
“But really, ma belle,” says Julie, drawing circles in the dust, ‘your house is truly quite … distasteful.”

  
“Distasteful? Wait, is it distasteful to tell a man who’s never touched a cunt since he left his mother’s how often you’ve frigged yourself raw thinking of him?” I say. “Just out of interest.”

  
Julie sniffs.

  
“That was before I was married, Anne, and quite below the belt in any case.”

  
She stops nagging me about the house, though.

 

Julie’s opera retells an old story by Marmontel, where a tragic young widow retires to the country, swears tragic chastity, and keeps her vow even when she falls in love once more. Then she dies. Tragically. I can’t see that it’s a story that requires retelling, but then Julie’s version hardly resembles the original. Her widow had a terrible marriage in the first place, and she gets to marry the new man, who is rich and handsome and kind. But only after it turns out that she herself has plenty of money on her own account. Certainly, this means that the story ends up being about two oh so rich and pretty aristocrats, for whom everything works out nicely in the end. But that didn’t stop all of Paris from turning up at the theatre, even in ’93. And Julie’s politics have never really been above reproach. There is even some talk of her having had Girondist sympathies.

  
But that isn’t the kind of thing we talk about now, and I didn’t know her then. Anyway, none of her other works have done so well. She doesn’t like to talk about that, either. And it is true that some of the attacks on her have been really very crude.

  
“And coming from me, chère,” says Julie, “that’s saying something.”

 

“I know what it is to be – unsatisfied – with oneself,” she says, and laughs. “With what one has achieved. When I was young I played a concert together with Wolfgang Mozart. He had such an accent! And he pinched my bum.”

  
I do not see what a chance meeting with a great composer has to do with the achievements of a comedienne, and I tell her so.

  
She laughs, again.

  
“Don’t let it worry you, darling,” she says. “Worry about your young marble lady.”

 

Once Julie told me that I was more a man than any other she had ever known. Yes, a man, she said. Ma bonne Anne. Really, you would think she had never met a man like me before, which for an actress is quite the achievement. Maybe it is just the name. Sometimes I wonder if she thinks I want to be my marble lady, or perhaps the nice young Pygmalion. Of course, I am a greedy old man and would quite like to be both.

But what I really want is something much, much worse.

 

When Rousseau’s Galatea resolves herself into flesh, she looks at her Pygmalion and says ‘Encore moi.’

  
Me too, me two.

 

My emulation.

  
I sigh and take up my brush. I am no longer a stupid young man who paints his lust in olive oil. A little more time at the canvas will firm me right up again.

 

Just a little more time.

 

I have been great before, had greatness. Heard it squawk in an empty church.

 

After all, I remember when I was young. When I was young, and painted men making a promise in a dry courtyard, and it seemed to me - it seemed to me, that I could paint anything at all.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, I really am terribly sorry about this. I tried to do a fairly straight-up, faux-Roman take on the Oath of the Horatii, but it ended up going very much sideways. 
> 
> So, um, here's a very overwrought and slashy piece on the construction of masculinity during the French Revolution?
> 
> Yeah, idek. I hope it even makes sense, frankly.
> 
> To which end, I should say now that this fic approaches David and the Oath of the Horatii through my version of Anne-Louis Girodet, one of his most successful pupils. To be honest, I'd never heard of Girodet until I started researching this fic, and I certainly take a lot of liberties with him here.
> 
> Trivially (!) in terms of chronology: Girodet actually remained in Italy until 1795. But I needed him to come and witness the tail-end of the Terror, so I yoinked him back early. Other, much more minor liberties have been taken with the historical record, and I'm sure I've got some things just plain wrong, but this is the biggie dates-wise.
> 
> More significantly, I do wonder about the ethics of what I'm doing here, which is putting a historical figure who was recognisably and I think undisputably gay, in modern terms, and jamming him into a slash fic - of sorts - with someone who really wasn't. (That isn't to say that David and his work don't read as queer to me, in a whole passel of ways. Just that he himself doesn't read as GAY AS GAY CAN BE, whileas Girodet does).
> 
> Yeah, can you tell I haven't written RPF before? 
> 
> In short, apologies for taking the long way round to the prompt, and in the process maybe doing some blurrying-up of queer history.
> 
> I should also add that I've used various (hyperlinked) David and Girodet paintings as section headings. But they don't correspond to the dates and places underneath - those are meant to situate the characters.
> 
> With that said (phew), thank you so much for the prompt (no, really, I had a ball) ... and happy Yuletide!


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